I’ve touched on the possible beneficial aspects of piracy before. But here’s a column by Dan Misener on CBC News’s Arts & Entertainment section in which he draws some of the same conclusions.
Misener spoke to publishing consultant Brian O’Leary, who reports that DRM-cracked pirated e-books are becoming increasingly more common—but that doesn’t necessarily mean piracy is having a bigger impact.
O’Leary makes the distinction between the instances of e-book piracy (the number of pirated e-book files available for download) and the impact of e-book piracy (the actual effect on the business of publishing). For O’Leary, the two are related, but different. He says that one way to measure impact is to pick a book, wait for it to be pirated, and then compare sales before and after.
Back in 2009, O’Leary did this for one publisher, O’Reilly Media, which publishes technical books. Surprisingly, he found that sales actually increased after their books showed up on pirate sites. Piracy seems to have boosted sales. O’Leary says people may have been using the pirated editions to sample books before they actually opened up their wallets.
Of course, as Misener points out, this is just one example, and doesn’t necessarily support generalizing to the entire publishing industry. But at least it shows that “piracy harms book sales” is not universally true.
O’Leary also points out succinctly that “Piracy really is the consequence of not meeting consumer demand.” There are plenty of cases where people who would otherwise buy the e-books legitimately are left with no way to get them.
"I think the average consumer cares about getting the content that they want, when they want it, in the format that they want, without a lot of overhead, at a reasonable price," says Brian O’Leary. "I think that publishers who realize that and organize their work and their publishing strategies to address those needs are going to succeed."
Nothing new in that, of course, but maybe if enough people say it, the industry might finally get around to listening.
*cue the usual mob of copyright Brown Shirts*
The problem here is that Because Piracy is such an all-purpose wonderful excuse it’s unlikely to go away – it’s much easier to put the blame on Dem Debbil Pirates than to adjust to the changing realities of the market (or deal with the fact that your books aren’t selling because nobody wants to read them).
Need an excuse for offering low royalties? BECAUSE PIRACY! Your latest book – the one that received no marketing at all – didn’t sell? BECAUSE PIRACY! People aren’t buying e-versions that cost three times what the paper edition does? BECAUSE PIRACY!
Cue the usual pro-anarchy fanatics.
The “expert” above deals in nonfiction which is a whole different market than fiction. Piracy may help sell books that are needed as resources over a long period of time or have illustrations that simply must be seen on the page like a how-to on repairing home plumbing.
Once-and-done popular fiction is a whole other matter. It is a very rare reader who will read a novel in the pirated version and then must buy the book in paper to reread. On the pirate forums, I have never read a pirate comment that they loved the author so much that they must buy all the books. Instead, they ask someone to upload pirate versions of the rest of the author’s backlist.
As to being sick of standard comments, the “blame the victim” comments about how authors and publishers deserve being pirated because they don’t do this and that have gotten really old. Even publishers and authors who do EVERYTHING the pirates want are pirated as badly as the worst offenders.
Most of “the bitch deserved it” comments are nothing but b.s. to make the pirates feel better about stealing or to give them the appearance of being justified in what they do.
Cue the usual anti piracy nutters …
“He says that one way to measure impact is to pick a book, wait for it to be pirated, and then compare sales before and after.”
My coursework in statistics tells me this is a rubbish test, since you have multiple variables at work. Demand for most books, in a world with zero piracy, would peak within a reasonably short time after release, then would decline over a longer period.
Using O’Leary’s measure would allow you to attribute ALL of that natural decline in sales to piracy, if you so desired, since there’s no way to tease out what’s piracy, what’s due to marketing [or lack thereof], bad/good word-of-mouth, audience saturation, etc.
God save us from amateur statisticians. Sheesh.
A couple of thoughts:
First: If sales increase as piracy does, could they not both be caused by underlying increases in demand for the book? Seems likely to me.
Second: Different types of books have very different market dynamics. Almost all of the popular discussion of piracy, costs, revenues, and so forth, is based upon fiction or trade non-fiction. They’re not even close to most of the book business, and even within THAT group, different segments act in profoundly different ways.
The audience for urban romance novels is going to do things very differently than the audience for Regency romances, much less the audience for Baen’s frequently cited experiments. And none of the above resemble the audience for knitting books or co-dependency self-help or . . . .
And piracy ALSO varies substantially. There’s the word-of-mouth piracy where one reader sends a copy to his/her neighbor, sister, or uncle. There’s “buy one copy, and put it on the company server” piracy of professional references, where any DRM gets hacked, and multiple people are using the one copy at the same time. There’s the status-piracy where Joe Torrent puts hundreds of thousands of ebooks on his drives and brags about them — without clue one what’s inside the files. And on, and on. We don’t know how much there is of any of those, nor do we know what they really do to the business, the authors, the others who work on these books.
SOME of those MAY generate sales. SOME may have no impact at all. Some may be very harmful.
These sweeping over-generalizations are poison to clear-thinking about the issues, in my opinion. People take something like this study or Baen’s experience, and make leaps that would shame a mountain goat from one spike of data across a chasm of unidentified variables to a peak of conclusions. I’m afraid we’re going to lose our footing this way.